Nurturing the Global Child

Approximately 17,000 children die worldwide every day, 44% of which occur in the first month of life, often from preventable causes. Effective medical, behavioral, and social interventions exist, yet scalability – working across borders and sectors – remains a challenge. To nurture vulnerable children into healthy adulthood, we join global initiatives, such as those led by USAID, helping to deliver effective practices, to mothers, babies, and their caregivers in clinics and at home.

There is an urgent need to develop and scale medical, behavioral, and social interventions to prevent the preventable causes of child mortality. Our team brings together expertise from public health, pediatrics, development and behavioral economics, and the humanities. We are furthering novel and risky ideas to advance child survival: developing portable multimodal imaging for early detection of hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy resulting from birth asphyxia and leading to mortality and disability, investigating opportunities to strengthen delivery of pediatric surgical services in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, developing and testing a novel technology to detect heart rate in non-breathing newborns, and unlocking social norms that influence family planning among adolescents.

Our Working Solutions

The2015 Lancet Commission on Global Surgery’s seminal work on surgical care in resource-poor settings identified several key themes related to surgical care in low- and middle-income countries. However, this report did not directly address deficits in pediatric surgical care. In many low- and middle-income countries, patients less than 15 years old comprise nearly 50% of the population, therefore, addressing the pediatric population is essential (Ozgediz et al, Toobaie et al, Bickler et al).